What I Learned About Wealthy People

“You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do.” - Milton Friedman

Reverse Information Paradox: In the AI age, the buyer risks giving away knowledge, just in order to use what they bought. You essentially pay for intelligence twice, once with money, and again with something even more valuable: the proprietary knowledge you must reveal to make that intelligence useful. The better you want the model to perform, the more of that knowledge you have to feed it! Over time, the information asymmetry becomes increasingly skewed. The seller learns more and more about you as you use what you purchased, while you learn very little about what the seller is learning in return. That is what I think of as the Reverse Information Paradox.

Satya Nadella@satyanadella

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3:09 PM · Jul 12, 2026 · 11.7M Views

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What I Learned About Wealthy People as a Private Banker: Rich people mostly own the same ETFs and index funds as the rest of us. There are no inside investing secrets. (This was honestly a bit of a let down!) They don’t time the market or trade actively - if they listen to their advisors. Some love a flashy PE fund or venture capital stake to talk about on the golf course, but alternatives are generally more status flex than return enhancement... There’s the former professional athlete whose assets are a tenth of what Google reports. The guy who rolls up in a Lamborghini who only has $7K in savings and borrows to pay his property taxes. The big-spending socialite who has zero control of any real money... Money doesn’t really change people. It magnifies what’s already there. Anxious people become more anxious. Generous people become philanthropists. Spenders ramp up spending on a never-ending hedonic treadmill of delights. Sibling disputes become expensive multi-year legal battles.

Country Risk: The tilt towards authoritarianism has increased over the last decade, with only 7.3% of the world’s population living in democracies at the end of 2025. Note, though, that there is still an open question of whether businesses and economies do better under democratic than authoritarian regimes, and the answer in the research is at best a “maybe”. From a risk perspective, democratic regimes create more continuous risk for businesses, with elections bringing regulatory and rule changes to economies, than authoritarian regimes, where governments can promise more continuity in policy, but when change does come to the latter, it is more likely to be large and wrenching... While country risk is determined by multiple factors, the challenge that businesses is in consolidating all of those risks into one number. The market that does this most directly is the debt market, where, when countries (sovereigns) seek to borrow money, lenders determine the interest rates to charge them, based upon perceived default risk.

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The UK-India Trade Deal came into effect this week with zero tariffs on 99% of the products.

To unpack where are the opportunities for Indian entrepreneurs to tap into, I went to London to sit down with Pratik Dattani, the Founder of Bridge India, to discuss:

1/ Opportunities across Textiles, EVs, AI and Manufacturing
2/ Professional Services outsourcing in Accounting, Legal and Healthcare work
3/ Jobs in Finance, Tech, and if a UK Education makes sense in 2026
4/ How Indian brands can place themselves on retail shelves in the UK

Check out the full episode on Founder’s Office with Sarthak Ahuja. Directed and Produced by Aditi Randev.